ART. V.-METHODIST LAYMEN.

Ir may be well to premise that the word laymen does not occur in our Discipline until 1872, and that it is then accompanied by an explanatory note which makes it "include all the members of the Church who are not members of the Annual Conferences." Prior to that the Church was classified as "ministers" and "members." The ministers were subdivided into two classes, known as the "local connection" and the "traveling connection," while in unofficial literature and discourse all others were called "private members." Though the only thing intended by the note was to segregate the "local connection" from the "traveling connection" in the single matter of voting for delegates to the General Conference, it is not the less inclusive of all other members of the Church in the term laymen; hence, since from the beginning the word "members" never excluded any age or sex or condition, this new name does not.

The rank of laymen, or of the laity, had its origin in the Mosaic economy. By that the priesthood constituted one division of the people, and to it alone was committed every thing appertaining to religious affairs; all other Hebrews were known as the laity, whose sole religious duty was to observe and do what the priests enjoined. These were called in the Hebrew 'am, in the Greek, laikos, and in the Latin, laicus, meaning in all these languages the people, without regard to age or sex.

The new dispensation was organized upon an entirely different basis. Whatever necessity there may have been to institute an oligarchy in the days of Moses for a people just out of four hundred years of bondage, it did not exist fifteen hundred years later, when the fullness of time had come for the advent of the Messiah; hence the Christ came of the laity, and, so far as the record shows, his labors were wholly with the laity. The twelvewere all laymen, and so were the seventy. While he paid due respect to the priestly office when occasion required he utterly ignored the priesthood in his selections of instruments for the establishment of his kingdom, and his immediate followers did the same. Paul, on more than one occasion, emphasizes the religious equality of all men, making the whole Church a royal priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices, and declaring that, though

16-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. VIII.

many, all were members of one body and every one members one of another. The entire absence of class was constantly displayed in apostolic times. One less worthy of a place in the Christian pulpit than Saul of Tarsus could hardly be found; yet when converted he conferred with no man, but began without formalities of any kind to preach that Christ was the Son of God, and that men should repent and do works meet for repentance-model preaching both as to doctrine and exhortation. When persecution drove all but apostles out of Jerusalem those who went preached as they went, and the hand of the Lord was with them-it was the work of laymen exclusively. But it was not in preaching alone that there was no distinction, for in church convocations for the discussion of doctrine and of polity "the whole Church" met with the apostles and elders.

It was near the close of the second century before any thing like priestly distinction obtained. Once introduced its spread was rapid, so that in a few centuries the Church was divided into orders, and priests and laymen were again far apart. It was thus when Luther and Calvin and their helpers began their work; and if any one thought more fully embraces the whole of their work than any other, it is that they bridged the chasm between the porch and the altar, and lifted the whole Church to the plane upon which it was organized by the Master, so that henceforth the word laymen should be only a convenient designation for that part of the Church not especially devoted to the work of preaching, with no distinction in rank or order. As a result of this, in all lands, in Calvinistic and Lutheran Churches, the laity are equally partakers with the ministers in every church convocation, from the least important local council to the highest assembly known to the denominations; and in none of these councils do they act in two houses or as separate orders, having distinct and possibly rival interests, but as equals in every respect, having a common interest in a common cause, with equal ability to consider and act.

It is not difficult to see why it is otherwise in the Church of England and the Churches springing directly or remotely from it. The so-called Reformation, out of which it sprang, was purely a political revolution, which resulted in dethroning the pope as the head of the Church and enthroning the reigning sovereign of the realm. There was not a single modification of

doctrine or polity which was not implied in this change of headship, and made necessary by it; hence the chasm between the priesthood and the laity remained unaffected except as political necessities required its modification. It was thus two hundred years later when Mr. Wesley was ordained a priest in that Church, and no man was ever more fully imbued with the notions of the Church in this regard than he was. It was this more than every thing else that so soon terminated his work in Georgia, and until his death he clung to the Church of England and wished his "societies" to do the same after he was gone. It was his wise mother that first led him to tolerate and afterward to encourage the preaching of laymen, not his own conviction of its propriety.

It was from such a source that the Methodist Episcopal Church received its trend of thought, and all along there has appeared this strange paradox-a movement which owes every thing to the labors of laymen as classified by the Church of England and by Wesley himself, yet drawing as marked a line between her ministers and her laymen as the highest churchly notion of that Church ever drew. During the first third of a century after the organization of the first society the laymen of the infant Church were wholly at the will of those who had the pastoral oversight of them. They were received into the Church on such terms as these dictated, and they were "excluded" without any intervention of their lay brethren. By the time of the Conference of 1789 this had caused such murmurings among the "private members"-the laity that that Conference ordered that in the future all "suspected” members should be brought for trial before the society to which they belonged or a select number thereof, and their case should there be heard, and they should have the right to appeal to the “quarterly meeting," whose decision should be final. This regulation was so repugnant to the views of Bishops Coke and Asbury that they appended a note to the Minutes, saying:

This is to take knowledge and give advice and to bear witness to the justice of the whole process that improper and private expulsions may be prevented in the future, plainly implying that private expulsions, if not improper, had been made.

There was to be, however, no concession on the part of the ministers that they were not sole judges in the case. They held:

The New Testament determines, beyond a doubt, that judgment and censure in such cases shall be in the minister. . . . There is not a word said of the Church's authority either to judge or The whole authority is expressly delivered into the hands of the minister.

censure.

...

As to the provision for appeal to the quarterly meeting whose decision was to be final, Coke and Asbury, in their notes, justify it only "because they are almost entirely composed of men who are more or less engaged in the ministry of the word." During the ensuing eleven years discipline was administered in accordance with this episcopal construction of the action of the Conference. But the dissatisfaction was so great that at the Conference of 1800 the society or select number was authorized to pass upon the guilt or innocence of the "suspected member," which was the first concession ever made to the laymen of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and almost the last. Meanwhile there had arisen a demand of the laymen to be represented in the Conferences. This had assumed such proportions by the year 1786 that the bishops, in their Notes on the Discipline, devote a chapter to it. They oppose it on Scripture grounds. The argument is: the Scripture teaches the itinerant system; lay representation would be fatal to this; therefore lay representation is not to be allowed-an argument which has been made to do service ever since. It is hardly hazardous to say, in looking back through the last hundred years, that in no one thing, if in all things combined, has there been as much unrest among the Methodist laymen as upon the single question of representation in the councils of the Church. By 1820 petitions began to reach the General Conference on the subject in great numbers, and they were renewed at almost every General Conference since in one form or another, until 1872, when lay delegates took their seats in the General Conference. In 1828 they were very numerous, but, unfortunately for the cause, a number of preachers, including some of the foremost in the connection, hitched it on to their opposition to the episcopacy in its various ramifications to make it do service for their crotchet, and this yoking together of two inharmonious elements proved detrimental to both. Intelligent lay men readily recognized in the episcopacy the strong arm of Methodism, and very few could be induced to cast their lot in with the

"radicals," as those were denominated who left the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1830 and organized the Methodist Protestant Church. They believed in lay representation; but if they could not have this without crippling that, they chose to bide their time. They therefore greatly mistake who count that the secessions of that year were the measure of the unrest in the Church on lay representation. The same advantage was sought to be taken of this sentiment in 1843, when another secession was inaugurated with antislaveryism as its ostensible basis. While the chief strength of that movement lay in the lay-representation sentiment, it, too, was hampered by its hostility to the episcopacy; and again, those who reckoned the extent of unrest upon the lay question by the number of laymen who joined in that movement reckoned without a proper basis.

Though in all the intervening years there was a profound feeling among Methodist Episcopalians upon the rights of laymen, there was little further movement toward securing it until the General Conference of 1852. One feature of the movement of that year was, that the petition was based wholly on the ground of expediency, and it was favored by men who had been most prominent in their hostility to it twenty-five years earlier, when the claim was made as a right. Prominent among these was Dr. Thomas E. Bond, of Baltimore. But nothing resulted from the petition. It was renewed in 1856, and again in 1860. This year the question was submitted to a vote of the laymen, to be taken in 1861 and 1862, but it was so indefinite in its terms that few laymen took any interest in it, and more voted against than for it, as did also the preachers. The demand was renewed again in 1864, with no result. In answer to the petitions of 1868, the scheme of admitting less than half as many laymen as ministers to the General Conference, with a proviso that they may be set aside at any time by the ministerial branch, and serve only as a negative force, was submitted to a vote of the members and of the Conferences. Though it was in no sense what the petitioners had asked for, the popular vote in its favor was more than two to one, and the ministerial vote more than three to one, and the plan then proposed is the present regulation of the Church.

It is certainly unwise to shut our eyes to existing facts in